VAN 114

Blood Music

Sing A Song Fighter!

Format: digipack CD

Edition: 1000

"On one of the numerous occasions I spent in the hospital last year. I was discussing music with an older man in the bed next to me. He was very interested in everything I said. He said, he’d lost track of what was happening ”out there”. New bands come and go every week, and he had no idea how to separate them from one another. ”I mean, at the end of the day, no one stands a chance to John Lennon”, he said.
Since the TV was in the very centre of the room, there was a lot of watching going on, and every time there was a music video on, he wanted my opinion. Did I like this? What genre was this? He wanted me to come up with new names and musical terms (the weirder the better) so I tried to answer him the best I could, including the question what kind of music I was making myself. We had some incredible word games there in our stiff white beds. And when it was time for him to leave the hospital, he suddenly grabbed me and said:
-By the way, you know you’re not a singer songwriter, huh?
-No? I said
-You are a sing a song fighter!

I liked that."

The quote above is from last year when Karl-Jonas Winqvist, on ordinary days one of the vocalists and songwriters in the Swedish critically acclaimed pop group First Floor Power, was thinking of a title for his album with his solo project Blood Music. The work with the record started already in 2003, but due to several serious brain operations, the road to the finished album was shaky to say the least. But now finally it is here and we are happy to present this unique collection of new songs. These are songs that don’t look in any other way and seem to lack apparent sources of inspiration. They are all permeated though, by Karl-Jonas Winqvist’s characteristic and ingenious narrative voice. These are also pop songs, in which the guitar has stepped aside a bit, and now share the space together with balalaikas, accordions, saxophones and strings.

“Sing a song fighter!” many times shifts in it’s set up and in it’s arrangements. And as Blood Music’s unpredictable live performances, the result here is music that is trying to find it’s own ways, and at the same time embraces simplicity and the smallest details. But then again, Blood Music is also a one man band that is constantly changing. Guest members come and go. Some stay longer, some hurry by. On this album they have all been part of contributing to fantastic songs like the peace hymn ““There is a war”, previously released as MP3-single), the melancholic “Wintercold” with the soft beat, or the heart breaking but not so obvious interpretation of the Roches’ “Runs in the family” from 1979, and finally the stripped down postcard from the reunion party “It’s a party”, or as his Swedish pop colleague mr Jens Lekman said in an interview last summer “Karl-Jonas has made the song, I’ve been trying to write for ten years now”. All together, the eleven songs form an exciting debut album that we hope you are going to enjoy as much as we do!

"There's quite a nice story behind the pun-tastic `Sing A Song Fighter!', Karl-Jonas Winqvist (aka Blood Music) spent a great deal of time in hospital for various brain operations and ended up in a bed next to a rather inquisitive older gentleman. Out of touch with `modern music' he would quiz our protagonist day after day about the state of the music scene, about genre and about pop videos. After some time, Winqvist needed to leave, and was told "You are not a singer-songwriter, you are a sing a song fighter", a phrase which never left him. All the while this was happening he was busying himself writing the album, which he started in 2003 but thanks to the trips to the hospital, ended up taking a lot longer than he had initially expected. Surprising then that the record sounds totally coherent and never once feels slapped together, the detailed and light-hearted
production never taking a turn for the worse, and more interestingly given his medical condition the album is rarely less than triumphant and up-beat. I'd like to reference the classic pop of the Beach Boys, the Beatles or The Kinks... albeit produced with the aid of a few synthesizers, a laptop and some broken drum machines. The Swedish certainly seem to have the right idea at the moment - they've always managed to put a happy face on things, remember the Wannadies... I'm pretty sure they were Swedish, and they were marvelously chirpy.
`Sing A Song Fighter!" is a perfect release for Static Caravan and should appeal to the masses of fans who enjoyed Tunng's debut album `Mother's
Daughter And Other Stories' - simply gorgeous....
Boomkat, June 2006

"So it might seem daft to put a song called 'Wintercold' on a July mix (unless you live in the Southern hemisphere of course, in which case it would seem eminently sensible), but I could not resist the irony of the act nor the brilliance of the track in question. It comes from Blood Music's Sing A Song Fighter on Static Caravan / Make It Happen, an album
that includes a song called 'It's A Party' that Jens Lekman said sounded
like the song he has been trying for ten years in vain to write. Of course
I think Jens is being unfairly harsh on himself, but certainly any fan of
Lekman's will find a kindred spirit in Blood Music's singularly special
singer-songwriter Karl-Jonas Winqvist (of critically acclaimed First Floor
Power). There are aesthetic links too to the likes of Herman Dune, or to
Hidden Cameras, to whose ineffable grasp of lyrical poise and naturally
challenging melodic inspiration this set also nods with a salacious wink.
Due for release on August 21st, Sing A Song Fighter looks set to be as big
a fixture in my late summer listening as it has been in the height of the
sunshine blasted days of July. If you have any sense you will make it so
yourself.tangents.co.uk, July 2006